A Bridge too Far

A flat tabletop game is somewhat boring, adding heights add a lot in term of playable events. But a good looking modular scenery is hard to build, and my “mountains” block have ugly gaps when put side to side. Using bridge is an elegant solution to mask my lack of skills in scenery modelling. I needed a more generic bridge after the fantasy flavoured Stoned Bridge ( Stoned Bridge ). The concept is a long build, with modular pillars allowing a range of different heights matching the mountain’s blocks.

Loading Blender and a few minutes after (like 60 or 120 minutes) a wonderful design is born…… hum. Basic and flat shapes, low polygon count.

A quick unwrapping of the model (after a very long reading of the book for the dumbs) let me draw the stones in a paint software. Each side of the bridge has it’s own texture. The next step is to use those textures as Stencil in the “inflate” sculpt tool using the dynotopo function that add details when needed. There was 750 faces in the bridge before sculpting the texture, 7 millions after. A very powerful computer is needed. I don’t have one. After decimating (reducing the number of face) between the sides, the total face is only 1,5 million.

The result on screen:

It’s time to get this thing out of the machine! Cut in half to adapt to the printer bed size. The hard work begin. Twelve hours of printing for each halves. Second half printing now.

And the first half with the base pillars. Holes in the pillars and the bridge allow a perfect alignment with the help of a few toothpicks. The pieces are straight out of the printer, not cleaned.